


Keep Us Fed

by thepartyresponsible



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Light Angst, M/M, Starvation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-02-16 11:39:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21507337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepartyresponsible/pseuds/thepartyresponsible
Summary: The morning after the stew runs out, Clint digs the tiny bag of instant coffee out of the bottom of his backpack. He was saving it for spring. He doesn’t see much reason to save anything now.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton
Comments: 73
Kudos: 419





	Keep Us Fed

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was originally posted on tumblr as part of the 2019 whumptober challenge. The prompt was "shaking hands."
> 
> The title is from "Mont Blanc" by Quiet Hollers.

The canned food ran out two days ago. Ever since, they’ve been working through what Natasha calls the _perpetual stew_ , an ever-simmering pot of whatever-the-hell. Mushrooms and rabbit, the carrots they weren’t supposed to pull up until spring.

The pot’s never meant to go empty. That’s what makes it perpetual. Natasha explained it in the fall, back when they were still pulling what felt like an endless array of vegetables out of the dirt. But she took the pot off the fire last night, made the kids wait until it was cool before she let them run their fingers over the metal, scrape out the very last of whatever food they could find.

The canned food is gone. The old stuff from before the world ended, and the new stuff they made themselves. The stew pot’s empty.

It’s midwinter, so everything smart is hibernating or hidden. Clint goes out every morning, but the most he’s come back with is a couple of winter-weight rabbits. It’s not enough.

Thor and Sam left a week ago, headed for the skeletal, picked-over remains of any town they could find. Clint doesn’t expect they’ll be back. And if they make it back, he doesn’t have much hope of them bringing anything with them.

He dreams about grocery stores. Deli counters and free samples and endless aisles of potato chips and Oreo’s. All kinds of things he’ll never have again.

He wakes up later and later. When you can’t eat, you sleep. The body only runs on credit for so long.

The morning after the stew runs out, he digs the tiny bag of instant coffee out of the bottom of his backpack. He was saving it for spring. He doesn’t see much reason to save anything now.

Natasha catches him at it, drinking hot coffee in the weak daylight, face lifted toward the sun, eyes closed. She’s always known him better than he ever knew himself. She leans into him, shoulder-to-shoulder, and she doesn’t ask, but he shares the coffee with her anyway.

“You should stay,” she tells him. Her cheekbones are sharp like they used to be, back when she was barely nineteen and it seemed like the whole world was taking turns taking bites out of her. She softened over the years, but she’s re-honed now. She picked up her old edges like any high quality blade will, when needed.

She’s the one who insisted on rations. She’s the only one who knew this was coming, could see this even back in September, when it seemed like they’d have food forever. It wasn’t enough. She let them take too much, and now there’s nothing.

He doesn’t blame her for that. He hopes she doesn’t blame herself.

“Saw some tracks yesterday,” he tells her. “Elk, I think.”

And God knows what the hell he’d do with an elk if he got one. He couldn’t lift a Golden Retriever right now. Hell, a Corgi might be a struggle. He hasn’t been this skinny since the circus. He hasn’t been this hungry since he lived with his parents. And maybe not even then.

Maybe this, right here, is the worst he’s ever felt.

But Natasha tips her head against his shoulder, presses the coffee back into his hands. He breathes in. It sounds stupid, but he missed the smell. A whole world to miss, the whole Goddamn functioning society they lost when the dead started eating the living, and he misses _coffee._

Well, he misses central heating, too. And pizza. He misses indoor plumbing and late night TV and firefighters and cops and paramedics. He misses having someone, anyone, to call for help. He misses cities and streetlights and a guaranteed future.

He takes another long sip of coffee. He breathes in the smell. It’s not so bad, really. Could be worse. He has Natasha, and Tony, and Pepper, and Morgan, and Harley, and Peter. And Sam and Thor, if they ever make it back. He has some kind of family. Took the whole world ending, but he found a family anyway.

He’s not going to lose them. And if he does, it won’t be his fault.

He hands the coffee back to Natasha. There’s a sip and a half left. He wants her to have it. He’d give her any wonderful thing he had. He’d give all of them anything he had.

“I’ll be back,” he tells her. “With dinner.”

He doesn’t believe it, but he says it anyway.

Natasha curls her hands around the coffee mug. Her eyes aren’t sad when they look at him, but he can’t really describe what he sees in them. The smile she gives him could break his heart, but the whole inside of him is frozen up. There’s nothing beating warm enough to break.

“Just come back,” she says.

He nods. He doesn’t say anything. When he leaves, he allows himself the small mercy of not looking back.

\- - -

There aren’t many people left. Clint wouldn’t hazard a guess as to how many survived. The sickness was viciously viral, airborne and _mean_. The walking dead got all the fanfare, but the pandemic itself killed something like a third of the people it infected, and only about a quarter of those reanimated later. If you lived through the sickness, you couldn’t get it again. Even a bite wouldn’t kill you.

But if you got bit first, you always died. And you always came back.

The last Clint heard, the worldwide death toll was estimated at something like 500 million. He can’t even hold that number in his head. And that was before the news stopped, before the governments fell, before the cities turned to slaughterhouses.

He has no idea what the final death toll was. Mostly, he’s been trying not to add to it.

That first year, everything was a mess. Everyone who lived was desperate. The winter killed a lot of them, and those that survived learned to be wary of strangers. Clint hasn’t seen anyone outside of his small adopted family for something like six months. 

They haven’t seen any zombies in that time frame either. Bodies decay. There’s probably a few left in more temperate climes, but, up in the mountains, they’ve been safe enough.

Clint’s not even looking for people. That’s his mistake.

He’s tracking elk, dragging himself toward the north slope, hoping to find them bedded down against the chill. It’s a sunless day, overcast and cold. They have more sense than he does. Well, they’re a lot less desperate, too.

It takes him hours to find them. And when he does, he has to sneak up close. They’re smart, and they’re fast, and he only has one chance.

He doesn’t think about it. About what the hell he’s going to do if he manages it. About how he barely dragged himself here. About how he doesn’t have a chance in hell of getting this meat back to the others.

He presses on anyway. There’s no other option. It doesn’t matter that he can’t. He _has to_.

But when he goes to take the shot, his hands are shaking. He’s cold, and he’s weak, and he can’t shoot his fucking bow.

He closes his eyes. He takes a breath. He thinks, as hard as he can, about how small Morgan is, about how she cried last night because she was hungry. He thinks about Nat, so skinny he can count the individual vertebrae of her spine through her shirt. He thinks about Tony, who stopped eating days ago, keeps sneaking his food to Harley and Morgan and Peter.

He can’t, but he _has to_. He got all the way here.

His hands are shaking. His fingertips are numb. He should’ve worn more layers; he should’ve brought better gloves. But he wasn’t sure he was going to make it back, and he didn’t want to take too much when he didn’t know if he’d be able to return it.

He’s too cold, and he’s too hungry. He kept skipping meals to keep them all fed, and now he can’t feed them at all.

They need him. He _has_ to.

He breathes out. He clenches his jaw so tight his teeth creak. He thinks of summer days and beaches and bonfires. He pulls the string back, and his fingers fumble, too numb to grip. The bow string _twaps_ loud and empty against nothing, and the elk snort, leaping to their feet.

_No_ , he thinks. Frantic, and panicked. He scrambles for the arrow, lurches to his feet. The elk are faster. Warmer, and better fed. He tries to pull the arrow back, but the shaking has spread to his arms now. He can’t do a Goddamn thing.

There’s the echoing crack of a gunshot, and one of the elk groans, low and pained, and tips over into the snow, legs kicking. The rest of the herd bolt down the slope.

Clint stares at the dying elk and can’t even comprehend what’s happening until a man emerges from the trees. The elk’s barely moving, too close to death to fight, and the man cuts its throat while Clint watches.

The stranger moves with an easy efficiency, kneeling in the snow while he pulls tools out of his bag. He’s dark-haired and scruffy, looks feral in a way that Clint can’t quite articulate. He doesn’t know why it makes him so nervous. Nobody looks particularly civilized these days.

Maybe it’s just that he hasn’t seen a strange face in so long.

It’s too bad, really, that the first stranger he meets is stealing a kill Clint couldn’t take himself but also can’t afford to lose. He puts his bow away and draws his knife. He’ll have to get close to use it, but it feels steadier in his hands than the bow.

By the time he leaves cover, the man’s already staking out the elk, tying its legs to tent spikes he jams into the frozen ground. If Clint waits long enough, maybe he’ll field dress the whole damn thing.

“You gonna help?” the man asks, when Clint gets maybe fifteen yards away. He looks up suddenly, looks right at him. His eyes fall on the knife, but he doesn’t look concerned so much as he looks irritated. “You gonna help?” he asks, again. “Or are you gonna cause problems?”

Clint hesitates. His hands are still shaking. It feels like every part of him is trembling. He had the coffee this morning and a quarter of a can of peaches two days back, and that’s been it. He hasn’t been full since Christmas.

When the man stands up, he’s too Goddamn big for the end of the world. He’s muscular like Thor was muscular back in the fall, when they had the food to feed all that bulk. But the look in his eyes is meaner than Thor, who’s always been so sweet-natured and friendly. The look in his eyes is cold and assessing, not friendly at all.

“I need that,” Clint says. He points at the elk. “I’ve got people to feed.”

The man’s eyebrows pull together. It’s a weird thing to notice, but it catches Clint’s attention. Under the sweep of all that dark hair, under the threat of that scowl, he has beautiful eyes. Bright and sky-blue. Intelligent.

There’s a weird moment, stretching out between them. The man shifts his weight. He runs his tongue over his teeth. It’s an anxious tell, more uncertain than angry.

“I know you need it,” the man says, finally. “Followed you for two miles. Figured there’s no way in hell you’d be out here if you didn’t have to be.”

Clint’s five miles out from their small grouping of cabins, but two miles is still too Goddamn close to the others. He’s lost the knack for hiding. There hasn’t been anything to hide from. He’s sure he left tracks leading straight home.

He’s tired. He’s so damn tired. It’s overwhelming, suddenly. He wants to lay down and sleep until none of this is his problem anymore. Until he doesn’t _have_ problems anymore.

But last night, Morgan cried. She’s just a kid. She deserves better.

“There’s kids,” Clint says. He doesn’t know that it’ll do any good. Sometimes you have to bank on mercy. Anyway, if this guy wants to hurt them, he’ll have to get past Natasha. And Natasha, even at bantamweight, is a wolverine in human skin. “There’s kids, and they’re hungry. I have to get this back to them.”

The man just stares at him. He has a knife in his hand, bloodied up from the elk, and a look on his face like he can’t figure out what the hell Clint is saying to him. Finally, he clears his throat.

“I’m trying to help you, asshole,” he says.

_Oh_ , Clint thinks. It jars in his head so hard that all the other thoughts run right into the back of it, like a trainwreck in his mind. He doesn’t think anything for what has to be almost a full minute.

“Listen,” the man says. He reaches up, hooks his long hair back out of his face. It leaves a streak of red across the pale skin of his cheek. He shrugs his backpack off, tosses it so it lands halfway between them. “You look really shaky. Maybe you should eat something.”

Clint stares at him, waiting for the trap. But the man just shrugs, seems to grow uncomfortable under the scrutiny. He turns his back on Clint and goes back to the elk.

There’s blood on the snow. Clint can smell it from here. Some ancient part of him, something brainstem-level and bent on survival, kicks awake at that smell, and his stomach twists up, so fierce and insistent that it aches like it’s going to leave bruises on his heart.

He crouches down, keeps the knife in one hand, and carefully opens the backpack.

There’s a treasure trove in there. Packaged food from pre-collapse, and plastic bags of what looks like jerky. Bottles of what’s probably water. Campbell’s chicken soup in a pull-top can.

Clint thinks, ludicrously, that he’s going to cry.

He takes the soup, instead. Drops the knife in the snow. He rips off the top and drinks it, knocking back the broth. The salt makes his brain hum, lights up all the taste buds on his tongue. He slumps, eyes closed.

“Jesus,” the man says.

When Clint opens his eyes, those blue eyes are narrowed. His frown is serious, and troubled. Disgusted, maybe.

Clint had honestly forgotten what embarrassment feels like. He wants to rub at his mouth, but he licks the soup off his lips and chin instead. In that moment, there isn’t enough shame in the world to make him waste good broth on manners.

“Maybe slow down,” the man advises.

“Sorry,” Clint says. He isn’t. He isn’t anything except relieved. He feels like he’s floating, like his toes and feet are miles away from his head.

His hands are still shaking, but the tremors feel less pressing now.

“Hey,” the man says. He kneels up in the snow. The concern on his face soften his features. He’s beautiful, Clint thinks, although the more reasonable part of him knows he’d fall in love with anybody who fed him right now. “You said there’s more of you? Kids?”

Cint nods. He should be careful. He shouldn’t give up any more information. But there’s a half-empty can of soup in his hands, and he can’t for the life of him doubt the intentions of anyone saintly enough to share food in the winter after the end of the world.

“Yeah,” he says. “Ran out of food yesterday. We’re all—there’s nothing left.”

The man looks like something out of the wild, like he was born and plans to die in the mountains, alone and unbothered by other people. But there’s worry on his face, in the intensity of his stare and the gentle downturn of his mouth. Clint shouldn’t trust him. _Doesn’t_ trust him, maybe. But.

There’s a can of soup in Clint’s hands, and a rifle across this man’s back. If he planned to killed Clint, he could’ve done it already, _before_ wasting supplies on a dead man walking. And if he plans to follow Clint back and hurt the people at home, he’s going to find out that feeding Clint first was a hell of a mistake.

“Okay,” the man says. “Look. My friend and I, we can help you. With the meat, I mean. Getting it back. You don’t have to—if you want, we’ll just bring it halfway, and then you can go get the others.”

Clint tips the can back up against his mouth, chews through a mouthful of noodles. He forgot what chicken tasted like. He forgot about all of it.

“Your friend,” he repeats, tracking the threat, focusing on the idea of there being more people like him. Well-fed and well-muscled. Armed.

“Yeah,” the man says. “Steve. And I’m Bucky.”

“Clint,” he says, mumbling it through more food. The bag’s still open at his side, and Bucky hasn’t said a damn thing about it, so Clint carefully swipes a bit of jerky, just to see what happens.

“Okay,” Bucky says. His eyes drop to the jerky in Clint’s hand, but he doesn’t say anything. He just nods, like it’s fine. Like sharing doesn’t cost him anything. Like he _wants_ Clint to have it. “Nice to meet you,” he says.

Clint laughs. He couldn’t say why, really. The giddiness of relief, probably. The unsteadiness of a brain flooded with dopamine after weeks of worry and hunger and weakness.

“Nice to meet you, too,” he says. There’s salt on his tongue, and food in his hands, and a weight slowly lifting off his shoulders. When he looks down, the can holds steady. His hands aren’t shaking anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> For fic updates and more unusual AUs, follow me on [tumblr](https://thepartyresponsible.tumblr.com/).


End file.
